STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Before, during and after Olu Fashanu’s basketball games, high school football coaches would work their way through the stands.
In gymnasiums, they’d plead with Fashanu’s father, Anthony, hoping he’d nudge his tall and athletic son toward the football field. Coaches would call the Fashanu family’s home and ask again until Anthony stopped answering.
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Grizzled by the AAU basketball circuit and through summers spent traversing the country for basketball, Anthony’s answer to all football coaches remained the same. His son never played football, and Olu was going to Gonzaga College High School where he wanted to play basketball.
Or at least that’s what they all thought.
“His first day of school, I dropped him off in the morning and at the end of the day around 4 o’clock I called him and said, ‘OK, I’m coming to pick you up,” Anthony recalled. “He said, ‘No Dad, I can’t go. Early in the morning when I went to class coach (Randy) Trivers came in and handed me all this football gear.’”
“That,” Anthony says between laughs, “is how Olu’s football career started.”
If there’s one thing to know about Anthony and Paige’s son, it’s that once Olu Fashanu is focused on something, he’ll obsess over it until it’s nearly perfect. The 6-foot-6, 308-pound left tackle has become that way with football too. That trait might help explain why the kid who was late to the sport and came to Penn State as a three-star recruit now might be the top offensive lineman in college football.
“There’s not a perfect player. I’m far from it,” Fashanu said this winter. He missed the final five games last season due to injury but said he will be ready to go this spring. “I think my biggest strengths are my attention to detail. … During a game week and stuff like that, I’d always have different things I’d want to work on that I didn’t do well in the last game. I made it like an emphasis during practice that week to get better on it.”
GO DEEPERWhat are the biggest spring practice questions in the Big Ten?Fashanu has started just nine games in his collegiate career, but he could’ve been a first-round NFL Draft pick had he declared. His parents kept the letter with his first-round draft grade on it. They were so proud they contemplated getting it framed.
When agents started calling Anthony last September to inquire about his son he wasn’t sure whether their interest was real. Olu made his first career start at the end of the 2021 season in the Outback Bowl, but other than that, he was largely developing behind the scenes.
Olu Fashanu, No. 74, was the Penn State coaching staff’s offensive player of the game twice in 2022. (John Reed / USA Today)
Penn State offensive line coach Phil Trautwein knew it was only a matter of time until NFL talent evaluators fell in love with Fashanu’s size, athleticism and smarts, but now it’s become a meteoric rise to and through college football. Fashanu’s parents are still trying to wrap their heads around it. Olu said he deleted Twitter and Instagram last season as the hype around him intensified.
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“He’s only played 600 snaps, but the thing about those 600 snaps is he’s played really well,” Trautwein said. “If it’s 2,000 snaps total or whatever it is of him being consistent then he’s again probably going to be talked about as the No. 1 tackle in the draft.”
Never in their wildest dreams did Anthony and Paige think that Olu’s testing into kindergarten at age 4 would mean he’d only be 19 during his third year of college football. They couldn’t foresee this future when the nursery school teachers called their son Mr. What’s Next because he’d breeze through activities well ahead of all the other kids.
“He’s not only book smart, he’s football smart, too,” former Penn State center Juice Scruggs said. “A lot of times he would know the ID for the play before I even said it. That was just another good thing about playing with him.”
But Fashanu’s age put him in a unique situation last year when it meant he would’ve headed into an NFL locker room after just turning 20 in December. Anthony asked agents what the average age in an NFL locker room was. Some told him not to worry about age, and that his son should not go back to school because of the risk of injury and his projected first-round draft grade.
Others asked just how much the potential top offensive tackle in this year’s draft class could improve with another year in college. From the outside looking in, it didn’t seem like there was much of a decision to make.
Internally, the family prayed on it, and when they dined together after the Ohio State game in October, Olu told them point-blank: He wanted to return to school. He didn’t second-guess that decision in the months after even as he dealt with injury. His parents agreed with the decision and shared that message with James Franklin and Trautwein.
“It was much easier to make that decision than for us to talk to the more than 50 NFL agents that were calling us,” Anthony said. “Some would not take ‘no’ for an answer.”
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Perhaps what some agents failed to recognize was that Olu’s grandmother, an educator in Nigeria, had long stressed to her family the importance of education. She was the one who would call Olu and talk with him every day as he got on and off the school bus as a boy. The family joked that it was long-distance child care, but the reality was they viewed anything athletically that happened after college as a bonus.
Olu’s parents will take another year of an inflated grocery bill whenever he’s home in exchange for whatever this next season and a college degree holds. All of this was never in the plans.
“I definitely felt like I would’ve been ready to leave if I wanted to last year,” Fashanu said. “I’m in a position where I can graduate in the summer, then this fall I can get started on my master’s. Obviously, (my parents) had their emphasis, but it was more on me just wanting to complete my degree and start my master’s.”
(Top photo: Erick W. Rasco / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)
